21st Century Breakdown

3.5/10

Best Track: “21 Guns”

Worst Track: “Christian’s Inferno” (sorry for the quality!)

It’s funny to think that the kids who didn’t care are now the world staple of politically driven, “big-message” arena rock. While listening to “21st Century Breakdown” I couldn’t help but to think about how that young man with crazy green hair sang about how masturbation lost its fun, tightened his pants, smacked on his eyeliner, completely lost himself wanting to be just like Bono, and then fell short. 18 tracks short, to be specific, as this album proves.

“21st Century Breakdown” is a another rock-opera but feels more like a pastiche, a collage, perhaps even an homage to Green Day’s friends, colleagues, and influences. The few places where the album is slightly entertaining are on the tracks that are different just slightly enough from another song so they would not be called plagiarism, as in the Hives-induced “Horseshoes and Handgrenades.” The same can be said about the blatant harmonic John Lennon rip-off “Last Night on Earth," initially written 35 years before as “Isolation” by Lennon himself. Not only on those tracks however, do we hear Green Day’s musical “allusions": “Know Your Enemy” mimics Clash’s vibrant “Oi oi oi!” punk tunes, and, shit, Billy Joe even gets his Brian May on with the epic, glorious solo at the end of the title track, “21st Century Breakdown", the same track that had already borrowed from Pete Townsend’s “bird-man” guitar playing in its introduction. However, if am listening to a Green Day album, where the fuck are Green Day?

But they are there, and when they are there, they are painfully trite and boring. Billy Joe’s lyrics are creatively lacking when introspective (Did you stand too close to the fire?/Like a liar looking for forgiveness from a stone) and childish when going political (I can hear the sound of a beating heart/that bleeds beyond a system that's falling apart). Musically speaking, almost every track on “Breakdown” follows the same formula: start off slowly, Billy Joe starts singing, enter drums and massive power chord harmonies. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with power chords, but there’s something wrong with the way Green Day employs them. The melodies are as repetitive and boring as the lyrics, which follow the loosely constructed tale of Christian and Gloria, the runaway couple that this rock opera is allegedly about. Even what I presumed to be Green Day’s forte, Tre Cool’s amazing drumming ability, is overshadowed by the necessity of Joe’s songs to appeal to the masses that are going to show up at the tour, the masses that he so often criticizes on “21st Century Breakdown” and on the former, definitely better album “American Idiot”.

I guess I just miss how it used to be when I first listened to Green Day. They recorded crazy, punked out songs where you could feel that everybody was doing what they wanted to be doing, just for the fuck of it. You could almost hear the energy of the Green Day boys playing in the studio: Mike Dirnt’s bass thumping, Billy Joe’s throat swelling up with his unfiltered energy, Tre Cool’s drumsticks beating away until they chipped, as is the case on “Basket Case." They were the embodiment of Generation X, and, unlike all of of the other acts happening at the time, they embraced it and loved it. “21 Guns," arguably the best track on “Breakdown,” has all the elements of a nice, listenable ballad and is even enjoyable, but it’s cliché. What made Green Day unique has disappeared.  Perhaps it was lost when Billy Joe went looking for other things to do besides what he did best: having fun, going crazy, and, perhaps most importantly, masturbating